Thanks to every one who replied. My original question was -
>>>
> I'm trying to upgrade a server from 2.5.1 to 2.7 via a vt100
> console. Here is what I'm doing:
>
> - shutdown to ok> prompt
> - boot cdrom
> at this point, the machines boots from the cd and queries me
> for language, locale and terminal type. After that, instead of the expected
> option to choose between upgrade/install, it is jumping into the install
> (a bunch of queries about name, ip number etc follow).
<<<
Here is the gist of what everyone said:: [my comments in brackets]
- It'll run all of sysid* stuff, and THEN will offer an option to
upgrade or install.
[ This was basically it, if everything else was done correctly.
Apparently this order could be different if the install program
uses NIS(or NISPLUS) name service to get this info. I have not
verified if such is the case.
Another person suggested that it is possible to bypass
sysid* queries by booting (boot cdrom -s) and invoke upgrade
utility from the prompt. I have not tried this. ]
- Correctly answering the queries is important because the program tries to
find an upgradable installation depending on the responses.
[ I didnot experiment with wrong answers to see what would happen.
One person said install program inspects the disk marked in eeprom
as book disk, and so answering the questions correctly is not
important. ]
- reinstall if at all posible instead of upgrading.
[ In this case, I didnot have a choice. We were specifically
asked to upgrade. ]
- check vfstab and comment out all non local mounts. (by Birger A. Wathne)
[ This was the next hurdle. Thanks to the very timely response from
Birger, the "upgrade" option came back after suitably commenting
out vfstab entires. ]
- Upgrade option may not show up for other reasons too such as if
/var is a symlink, or if a certain file in /var doesnt exist.
- One persone suggested that it should also have queried for default gateway
so that the NFS backups (during partition shuffle) would work.
For some reason, I didnot encounter the query. That would have
saved us the trouble of having to add an additional disk for
partition shuffle.
I have finished the upgrade, but I'm not too impressed about the overall
process. My impressions are -
- If given a choice I'd do a fresh install jumpstart (after saving
customizations, and taking suitable backups) instead of an upgrade.
- metadisk mirrored /, /usr and /var are a pain during upgrades.
- I'd rather do my own repartitioning and shuffling file systems rather
than the upgrade process do it. (In what appeared to me in a bout of
irrationality, it made the previously 50M / into 300M, shrunk 300M /var
into 90M - and so on).
- good backups save your posterior. (again and again).
Here is the list of all helpful people that replied:
Michael Brock
Alex Stepney
Casper Dik
Birger A. Wathne
Bertrand Hutin
Charles Gagnon
John McIntire
Kevin Sheehan
Michael Allmen
Tim Evans
Charles Donelle
Peter DeQuoy
Ray Saddler
David Foster
David G Wiseman
S Gauthier
Darren Dunham
Thanks all,
-vijay
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:13:29 CDT